Classical music
geoff brown
Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, so diffident on the outside, resigned from his important European post as the Vienna State Opera’s music director with immediate effect. Irreconcilable artistic differences were cited. Then on Monday morning, the day after fronting the patchily effective Proms debut of Qatar’s multi-national, peace-loving trophy Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew Passion staging however, first seen in 2010, is that it does nothing of the sort.By the end of three hours of delicate, interpersonal drama and choric tableaux, Sellars has made no statement at all, and that refusal, that restraint, allows Bach’s music to speak louder than any amount of “konzept”. Of course Sellars is not alone in this. Jonathan Miller’ Read more ...
David Nice
“You feel like you’re walking into Fame, the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six-part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of what, at least in the first episode, turns out to be a mere infomercial for New York’s prestigious academy of performing arts.The format ought to work: start of academic year in episode one - select, out of the lucky seven per cent chosen from auditions, a dancer, actors, violinist, jazz pianist, and follow their progress. I can only hope a singer will be in the offing, too; for now, there's a palpable imbalance Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For the first night of its 114th season, the dear old Wiggy welcomed back its regulars after the summer break. A starry occasion like this recital by Joyce DiDonato and Sir Antonio Pappano gets booked out virtually exclusively by those patrons and members, so it was an evening with a lot of air-kissing and greeting across the familiar rows of red seats. The hall does have a special vibe when it's completely full, as does the knowledge that the audience is seeing an artist who can - and will - sell out venues several times its size. The two nights of this programme (the second is on Read more ...
David Nice
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could trust Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin army of generals to turn in any amount of subtle colours.It seems fair to launch by praising Stefan Dohr’s first horn and the cor anglais of Dominik Wollenweber as the respective signature tones of The Firebird and the Symphonic Dances. But while I’ve spent an obsessive interim period of listening to confirm Respighi has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Grieg: Holberg Variations 1B1/Jan Bjøranger, Christian Ihle Hadland (piano), Erlend Skomsvoll (piano) (Simax)This release has a nifty title, and contains three different performances of Grieg's ubiquitous Holberg Suite, each one marvellous in its own way. This five-movement piece began life as a work for solo piano in 1884, the familiar string orchestra version following a year later. The Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland plays the original incarnation, and phenomenally well; the faster, tricky music made to sound wholly natural and spontaneous. There's something magical about Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Walton’s Façade is not performed very often in London, but this weekend there is the opportunity to hear it four days in a row: on Monday at a chamber Prom, but before that in this enterprising staging, paired with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King.The original conception of Façade was that it should be performed “in as abstract a manner as possible” but this interpretation is as specific as possible. 84 days after the end of the First World War, the patients at an asylum for those mentally scarred by the conflict gather to perform music together. The reciter’s part is shared Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Conductor Marin Alsop was welcomed like Britannia herself at last night’s concert, an astute partnership of John Adams’ vivacious hybridism and Gustav Mahler’s colourful patchwork quilt of a symphony. Alsop won the Prommers’ hearts with her successful navigation through the choppy waters of last year’s Last Night, but the ecstatic ovation greeting the conclusion of this performance was for something quite different: she directed the BBC Symphony Orchestra in lean, energetic and for the most part precise accounts of seemingly very different works, which she juxtaposed intelligently.John Adams Read more ...
David Nice
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. But it was a rainbow-hued day inside the Cadogan and Royal Albert Halls, culminating in a spectacular and perhaps unrepeatable Respighi triple bill of Roman impressions.The Grosvenor happening (***) was a first in several Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It is the fate of Edinburgh Festival directors to programme their music in the considerable shadow cast by the Proms in London. The undeniable economics of large scale touring means that few orchestras will visit Edinburgh alone, so to attract all-important critical attention the Festival must somehow manipulate a limited touring repertoire to create a unique Scottish event. But on the other hand, the festival must also recognise that for most of their discerning local audience the Proms are little more than a massive irrelevance that serve only to clutter up the BBC schedules for months on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony no 2 Wiener Symphoniker/Carlo Maria Giulini (Wiener Symphoniker)No apologies for reviewing a reissue, as this disc is fabulous. Originally a 1974 EMI recording, it's now released on the Wiener Symphoniker's own label. Carlo Maria Giulini was their Music Director between 1973 and 1976. The orchestra apparently loved him, and there's an affectionate sleeve note penned by Robert Freund, principal horn during his tenure. Giulini's professionalism and quiet humility shine through, and Freund rightly alludes to the conductor's spontaneity. Giulini's few Bruckner recordings Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture could probably have been spotted from the balcony. A motionless, virtually breathless audience is a rarity even at the Proms, where quality of listening is venerated; still, to hold around 6000 people quite so rapt with attention is an extraordinary skill in orchestra and conductor. But then, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer are no Read more ...